Useless!  The name returned, and the citizens.  At the end of the fifteenth century it fell under Spanish rule, and had no kind of peace whatever until after another siege by a large French army, it was regained by France in 1640.  Fourteen years later the House of Austria had yet another try for it, and the Archduke Leopold laid siege to the city.  He lost 7,000 men, 64 guns, 3,000 horses, and all his transport, and fled. (Last August was the first August in two hundred and sixty years which has not witnessed a municipal fete in celebration of this affair.) Since then Arras has had a tolerably quiet time, except during the Revolution.  It suffered nothing in 1870.  It now suffers.  And apparently those inhabitants who have stood fast have not forgotten how to suffer; history must be in their veins.

In the street where we first noticed the stove-pipes sprouting from the pavement, we saw a postman in the regulation costume of the French postman, with the regulation black, shiny wallet-box hanging over his stomach, and the regulation pen behind his ear, smartly delivering letters from house to house.  He did not knock at the doors; he just stuck the letters through the empty window-frames.  He was a truly remarkable sight.

Then we arrived by a curved street at the Cathedral of St. Vaast.  St. Vaast, who preached Christianity after it had been forgotten in Arras, is all over the district in the nomenclature of places.  Nobody among the dilettanti has a good word to say for the Cathedral, which was built in the latter half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, and which exhibits a kind of simple baroque style, with Corinthian pillars in two storeys.  But Arras Cathedral is the most majestic and striking ruin at the Front.  It is superlatively well placed on an eminence by itself, and its dimensions are tremendous.  It towers over the city far more imposingly than Chartres Cathedral towers over Chartres.  The pale simplicity of its enormous lines and surfaces renders it better suited for the martyrdom of bombardment than any Gothic building could possibly be.  The wounds are clearly visible on its flat facades, uncomplicated by much carving and statuary.  They are terrible wounds, yet they do not appreciably impair the ensemble of the fane.  Photographs and pictures of Arras Cathedral ought to be cherished by German commanders, for they have accomplished nothing more austerely picturesque, more religiously impressive, more idiotically sacrilegious, more exquisitely futile than their achievement here.  And they are adding to it weekly.  As a spectacle, the Cathedral of Rheims cannot compare with the Cathedral of Arras.